Élodie

Where is Elodie?  Where is Waldo?  Carmen Sandiego?  They have all split, haven't they?  And no one knows precisely who they are, where they are and why they are essential to disabled travel planning.

Okay, so I can't get my retirement account tax forms into the IRS, my desk looks like a recycle bin, the lettuce in my garden has bolted without being eaten -- but I'm going to find Elodie.  Planning a trip with a wheelchair is so dauntingly complex and taxing of spirit that the only way to succeed is to either inject methamphetamine into this or that vein or become deeply and seriously obsessive-compulsive.  Travel plans are to the committed quadriplegic what a dead mallard is to a golden retriever.  It's that thing you go after, sink your teeth into and just don't let go of.  It's also that thing you don't think about too much, because serious consideration would cost you your sanity.  But let's not go there.  Let's go back to Elodie.

First, it's probably Élodie, her accent aigu having been stripped away by e-mail.  Secondly, she is hanging out in Italy these days and working for 'Accessible Italy,' a firm or organization (one isn't sure) that, among other things, hires out wheelchair-lift-equipped vans to wandering quadriplegics.  I know Élodie exists.  She responded rather promptly to my e-mail the other day, in fact, loaded me up with all the in's and out's of crippled van rental in Tuscany.  Florence Airport arrivals only.  Not Pisa, a real airport with real airlines, including British Airways, with trains that leave right from baggage claim and go to the heart of Florence.  No.  Florence Airport.  And return the van filled with gas or you'll be charged €70.  Got it, Élodie.  Now how do I reserve your silly Kangoo van with the wheelchair lift for 11 days?  Hard to say.  Élodie has disappeared.  So far, our trip amounts to one hotel reservation, no ground or air transportation...and no time to screw around.  Marlou's window of non-chemo opportunity just opened last week with her doctor's PET scan verdict.  We have to hustle.

Thing is, Tuscany is big into villa rental.  Just read the travel section of any newspaper.  But in a sellers' market, there are just too many opportunities for thievery...places with wells that run dry, sewage that backs up, staff that disappear.  I don't know.  It's simply too far away to hassle with, unless you've got some help.  CIT, the Italian state travel agency, has proven a friend to me on at least two occasions.  But those occasions were in the past when I could still hobble around effectively with a crutch.  CIT's London office was just the thing.  Unfortunately, they don't really have an operation in the US.  Still, this didn't stop me from wasting precious days trying to rent a villa, well, part of a villa, from actual Italians, the people who pioneered Italy, in their London, well, Croydon, headquarters staffed by the people who pioneered Chiantishire.  I wasted several days waiting to hear from Élodie before making an online stab at the last three villa apartments CIT was offering online in Tuscany...each of which proved to be up a flight of stairs.  A phone call to Croydon would have helped, but all the website telephone numbers were of the British 800 variety, useless to those outside the UK.  And the clock was ticking.

Élodie, please respond.  Do I dare to book airline tickets without a way to get around Tuscany?  How does anyone in business, the business of renting vehicles or renting anything, just disappear?  Disabled travel arrangements are like this.  The market, if one can call it that, is very small.  It is also an awkward hybrid, falling in economic terms, somewhere between service industries and social services.  Accessible Italy, for example, is a nonprofit, an NGO established to help people make their disabled way to holiday villas, hotels, cultural sites, the best place to obtain dialysis in Ravenna, and so on.  They also rent out disabled vans, described in an info sheet from Élodie.  That's where our discussion ended.  Élodie has been out of action, not responding to subsequent e-mails.   

Should I go ahead and purchase airline tickets?  After all, time is running out, seats are disappearing and fares rising faster than the Venice lagoon.  And what about Venice?  Do they have disabled vans there?  Sure, they've got a few bridges, but so does San Francisco Bay.  Thing is, I'm kind of bound.  Tuscany-bound, that is, where we have a hotel.  What's so special about a hotel?  Well, in Tuscany any hotel with an actual room this time of year is rather special.  One that offers wheelchair access is ultra-special.  A Room with a View.  A view of a swimming pool, even.  A swimming pool may be a good thing, because one shouldn't count on the shower.  Marlou heartily recalls the disabled-accessible room we found in Bourgogne, beautifully remodeled from a provincial French farm building, on the ground floor and level as could be.  But with a pelvis-shattering shower floor so slick one could ice skate without skates and, of course, no railings.

Underlying all this is the element of cost.  But we don't care, so don't talk to me about euros.  There's probably some complex derivative that an arbitrage guy will sell you, based on the size of Marlou's liver tumor, correlated with the relative value of international currencies, pegged against the barrel price of oil...all of these factors fluctuating with estimates of the projected restart of chemotherapy.  But we don't go there.  We go to Tuscany.